Treat the absence of a clear authority chain as a security failure in itself. Contain the involved identities, revoke the compromised delegation path, and trace the signed call chain backward to the last legitimate principal before deciding whether the issue was a rogue agent, a compromised node, or a broken trust boundary.
Why “No Clear Owner” Is Itself an Incident Condition
When an AI agent event has no obvious accountable actor, the problem is not just attribution, it is governance failure. Treat the missing authority chain as part of the incident scope, because delegated actions, token exchange, and proxy execution can still produce real impact even when no human or system owner is immediately visible.
The first task is to stop the blast radius, not to settle blame. In practice, that means freezing the involved agent sessions, disabling the delegation path that allowed the action, and preserving the call trail so you can reconstruct which principal last had legitimate authority.
That reconstruction matters because the apparent “agent did it” explanation can hide three very different conditions: a rogue agent, a compromised node using valid delegation, or a trust boundary that was never enforced correctly. Each leads to a different containment and recovery decision.
How to Reconstruct the Authority Chain
Start from the observed action and walk backward through signed requests, exchanged tokens, and tool calls until you reach the last legitimate principal. That last valid hop is the control point that tells you whether the incident came from overextended authority, stolen credentials, or an orchestration flaw that let an action proceed without a proper decision.
Preserve the evidence needed to answer four questions: which identity initiated the request, which identity approved or minted delegation, which service or node executed it, and whether each hop was expected for the task. If any hop cannot be explained, treat that gap as part of the failure, not as a documentation problem.
Where the chain includes multi-agent or tool-mediated handoffs, multi-hop delegation and containment become the central forensic lens. If the agent’s access was broader than the task required, the AI Agent Authorisation Guide is the practical model for understanding why per-action policy matters more than static access.
What the Decision Should Change After Attribution
Once the chain is reconstructed, the response should follow the failure mode, not the label. If the issue was a rogue agent, remove its standing access and confirm that no sibling agent can reuse the same authority path. If the issue was a compromised node, rotate or revoke the credentials and tokens that node could mint or forward. If the issue was a broken trust boundary, fix the policy enforcement point before restoring service.
That is why post-incident work must cover both identity and observability. AI Agent Observability, Audit and Incident Response Guide is useful here because attribution depends on logs that can survive incident pressure, and Zero Trust for AI Agents gives the right default posture: verify the principal, verify the request, and remove standing privilege before action is allowed again.
For teams that need a protocol-level reference for delegation and impersonation, RFC 8693: OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange helps explain how on-behalf-of flows should be traced and bounded. If token exchange cannot explain the action cleanly, the safer assumption is that the delegation model is not trustworthy enough for production use.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 sets the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | ASI03 — Identity & Privilege Abuse | The question is about unclear responsibility after agent action, which is fundamentally about abused or broken authority. |
| Recommendation — Enforce per-action authorization and remove standing privilege from agent flows. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-9 — Service Identification and Authentication | Agent-to-service delegation and signed call chains depend on authenticating non-human actors and their service calls. |
| AU-6 — Audit Record Review, Analysis, and Reporting | Tracing the signed call chain backward requires usable audit evidence for reconstruction and response. | |
| AC-6 — Least Privilege | Compromised delegation paths become dangerous when agents can act beyond task scope. | |
| Recommendation — Authenticate service and workload calls so each hop in the chain is attributable. Review audit records to reconstruct the last legitimate principal and sequence of actions. Limit agent permissions to the minimum scope needed for the task. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Contain first, then prove the authority chain. The most useful early question is not “who is guilty?” but “which delegation path can still act right now?”
What to verify: Confirm that the final legitimate principal is actually legitimate for the action in question, that the token or assertion was intended for that scope, and that the same path cannot be replayed through another agent or node.
Decision rule: If the incident cannot be tied to one accountable principal within the preserved call chain, treat the platform as having failed authorization and delegation control, not merely incident attribution.
Practitioner takeaway: In agent incidents, accountability is part of the control plane, so if you cannot name the responsible principal you should assume the authority model failed and remediate the delegation path before restoring trust.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on October 12, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org